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Liao Han-Teng廖

漢騰汉腾漢騰汉腾

Oxford Internet Institute牛津

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研究所

How to even out an uneven analytics of user-generated content: geolinguistic normalization as one possibility

In response to the “Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information“, I argue that researchers and analysts must be explicit and transparent about the parameters of ideal “eveness”. Ideal evenness could be as simple as a sense of proportionality to the number of speakers, the number of Internet users, or the number of offline publications. Such sense of “evenness” provides essential and concrete baselines for online/offline, cross-country, and/or cross-language comparison. In a poster for the upcoming Opensym 2014, my coauthor and I propose one such possibility of using the number of language speakers across different countries (e.g. Arabic speaking population in Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, etc.) to showcase how the viewing and editing traffic is unevenly distributed.

In a nutshell, it is not surprising that Egypt and Saudi Arabia as major contributing country for reading and editing Arabic Wikipedia, but it is interesting to see, *per capita*(as defined here as per the number of Arabic language speakers for each region), smaller and yet more Internet-ready countries such as Israel, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, etc., contribute significantly more.